I find myself working with HipChat these days. Seems like we need a thread about the state of the art for interoperate with Adium.

First off the Hipchat client does not appear to have OTR support, so your chats are accessible to them and those who they take instructions from (courts, employeers, etc.) Presumably if your correspondent is using a real jabber client with OTR support you could route around that.

When joining a room, ignore their instructions. Just use Adium's "Discovery Browser" which is a submenu of the account, either in the File->12345_987654@chat.hipchat.com->Discovery Menu, or in the preferences off the accounts listing.

Once you join a room the first time, you'll probably want to: a) book mark it, b) change the name, c) decide if you want it to autoopen. That work is quite tedious. I was unable to puzzle out how to craft a xmpp:... url to reach these rooms.

I was unable to puzzle out how to get images into my hipchat messages. Images pasted into the hipchat client appear in adium as clickable links, at least for me. I can paste images into adium, but the hipchat server or client declines resulting the file upload.

Hipchat also has this silly feature that let's a user edit his most recent IM by doing "s/recent/reasonably recent/", the correspondent(s) client side then revises things. Nice for quick fixes for typos.